The Sad Reason We’re Just Now Getting A Female Doctor Who

You have that one pal, right — the one who’s ever trying to get you to watch Doctor Who ? Or perhaps you are that pal. Either lane, you probably know that every few years, the title character of Doctor Who turns into a new Doctor dude, played by a new actor.

Those with even a passing awareness of internet outrage culture know that this time around, the new Doctor is a woman. When Jodie Whittaker made her debut as the first female Doctor last year, it was glorious! My bra burst into flames of exhilaration as I watched Peter Capaldi’s angry magician face replaced with Whittaker’s feminine features.

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But why did the Doctor wait so long to do this, living 12 lifetimes as the same brand of old white guy with questionable way appreciation? Other than a fear that a certain segment of angered devotees would burn down the studio? I think there’s an interesting in-universe reason …

Let’s Quickly Explain The Nerdy Rules Of Doctor Who

It’s been connoted before that the Doctor can’t choose how he appears where reference is regenerates. The Ninth Doctor told Rose Tyler that he “could end up with two heads, or no head” after regenerating. Both the Tenth and Eleventh Doctors complained that they were hoping to be gingers( me too, bros ). And yet Romana, a Time Lady from the same planet as the Doctor and a former friend, constructed regeneration seem as simple as changing a sweater. A squishy meat sweater.

So why is it so easy for Romana to control regeneration and so complicated for the Doctor? Is it because he sucks? If regeneration is a completely random lottery and the Doctor could become any kind of creature in the world, how does he reach the “love child of Jeremy Irons and Christopher Walken” jackpot every single time?

Maybe it’s because he can control his regeneration, but he knows that since he expends a lot of day on Earth( which is totally for special Time Lord reasons and not TV budget reasons ), being a man is simply the easiest way to get things done. It’s not that I believe the Doctor actually cares about his gender; it’s more that he is felt that the rest of the world does. He simply lies about it to his almost-always-female friends because, well, that’s kind of an awkward conversation to have.

Now Let Us Count The Ways This Makes His Job Easier

Think of all the times the Doctor has had to burst into a room and yell “Everyone listen to me and do what I say! ” More often than not, the “everyone” who has just been criticized by a haphazard British gentleman complies with his wishes.

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In the first episode of Series Five, he hacks into a meet of all the greatest scientists on Earth, hurls some math at them, and persuades them to spread a computer virus he whipped up on a cellphone . They don’t topic his authority. They don’t even ask where he got his degree. He could have a doctorate in Frisbee Science from Zac Efron University, for all anyone knows, but they’re still willing to bet the fate of our entire planet on him.

The Doctor will still be a genius as a woman, of course, but getting people to actually shut up and listen to your genius terms is statistically an uphill battle for women. The Pew Center, when looking into why there aren’t more women in leadership posts, found that the number one reason girls seem they’re not able to move up the corporate or political ladder is because they seem held to higher criteria than men. And in general, humen with some authority don’t ever react well to a lady coming in to upset the apple cart.

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So if a woman bursts into a chamber with some unorthodox petition she insists will save “the worlds” … well, let’s just say that we’d better hope she’s not up against a tight deadline. They will take some convincing.

BBC This doesn’t even factor in if they’re Facebook commenters.

And Remember, The Past Sucked Even More

Cracked has now been covered why day travel would suck for women( epithet an period you can go to that wouldn’t getting worse than now, and who knows what the future holds ), and that’s if you’re simply joyriding around, assuring the sights. The Doctor, on the other hand, has to actually to continue efforts to get shit be done in order to the past without get burned at the stake. She can’t even get through her usual speech of “I’m The Doctor, I’m a time-traveling alien-” because past peasants would say, “Please, let me stop you at ‘doctor’ so I can stone you to fatality in silence.”

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Previous Doctors have employed psychic newspaper( basically a sorcery business card) to get around in the past without any difficulty, as it tricks onlookers and allows them to continue creeping around castles unhindered. Nonetheless, it doesn’t work if there isn’t any conceivable thing the Doctor could be rationally doing. It relies on the mind of the person looking at the paper. So if 1600 s Craig the Knight can’t think of a reason to the reasons why a lone female stranger would be poking all over the King’s armory, the paper is blank, the Doctor is beheaded, and all of humanity becomes Cybermen.

BBC Damn it, Past Craig.

OK, So Why Change Now?

But why throw a uterus into the works now, if he knows it’s going to build their own lives harder? Well, the Doctor is on his second round of 12 regeneration cycles. He was supposed to be really, 100 percent entirely dead , not only dead-with-a-new-body, after the 11 th iteration. But the Time Lords awarded him an additional 12 lifetimes. At the phase of his regeneration into a woman, The Doctor is roughly 2,000 years old. Maybe after two millennia, he chose he was finally ready to try life on hard mode. He understands being a woman will be more difficult, but he knows if it demonstrates to be too much, he’s get quite a few more shots.

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And if there was any Doctor willing to take that chance, it would be Peter Capaldi’s. Less of a swashbuckling hero and more of a grumpy time-bending uncle, Capaldi definitely seems like the various kinds of Doctor who would think “Screw it. Let’s dedicate it a whirl.” He’s willing to deal with someone hollering “Nice ass! ” at him as he tries to save them from being exterminated by a Dalek. He’s willing to recalibrate the psychic newspaper to just say “woman troubles” and hope that works. He’s willing to have to occasionally interrupt history’s various Craigs. After 2,000 years, he was ready for a new challenge.